


Your Possible Pasts

by propergoffick



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Homeless, Angst and Tragedy, Bay over Bae, Depression, F/F, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Multi, Songfic, but hey there's an outside chance of semipositive marshfield, look this one's bleak and our precious time bean does not deserve it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 02:22:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,005
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13331472
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/propergoffick/pseuds/propergoffick
Summary: Max did the right thing, and it hurts. She can't live with herself, so she's just marking time, waiting to die.And in the meantime, she sings.





	Your Possible Pasts

**Author's Note:**

> Recommended version: https://youtu.be/jH8pRkDEWEQ
> 
> No beta because I don't want to break my poor beta reader's heart.

There’s a girl with a guitar who sits by the old diner in Arcadia Bay. Same spot, every day. She’s small, kinda mousy-looking, and she was probably skinny even before the streets took hold of her. She doesn’t make eye contact much, but sometimes someone stops and tries to talk to her, and she looks up with the bluest blue eyes in the world and she murmurs an apology and she goes on singing.

All her songs are sad. They’re about time, and love, and loss, and longing. The handful of people who know who she is know she’s carrying an inexplicable, unspeakable pain; something she needs other people to frame in words for her. She missed an opportunity, they think, and she’s in mourning for it, like she has been her whole life, and isn’t it such a waste?

Then, mostly, they forget about her, because that’s what people do.

They’ve got her all wrong. She didn’t miss an opportunity. She took one. She did the right thing, and it’s gnawed at her every single day of her life.

> They flutter behind you - your possible pasts  
>  Some brightened and crazy, some frightened and lost  
>  A warning to anyone still in command  
>  Of their possible future to take care  
>  In derelict sidings the poppies entwine  
>  With cattle trucks lying in wait for the next time
> 
> Do you remember me? How we used to be?  
>  Do you think we should be closer?

She sleeps in the junkyard up in the hills. The police know about her, but they know troubled teens have been hiding out up there for years, and it’s kind of an open secret now, and nobody really gives a shit.

As she grows older, and colder, and the handful of people who know drift away one by one, she becomes a fixture. A girl with a guitar, who sleeps alone in a cold concrete shack and spends her takings on guitar strings and permanent markers and okay, occasionally food, and even more occasionally on drugs, which she buys from a sad surly guy in a sad dirty RV who’s the closest thing she has to a friend. And he hates her, and she hates him, but they’re on each other’s team in a fundamental way.

They’ve both lost the only person who made them feel like they fit in the world.  
They’ve both killed someone who used to love them.

When he dies, and the state does what’s necessary with him, she claims his ashes and takes in his dog and moves into his RV, and things are okay for a while. The kids learn not to bug her and the dealers - well, nobody’s sure who freaks who out more.

And it’s life, for a while.

> She stood in the doorway, the ghost of a smile  
>  Haunting her face like a cheap hotel sign  
>  Her cold eyes imploring the men in their macs  
>  For the gold in their bags or the knives in their backs  
>  Stepping up boldly, one put out his hand  
>  "I was just a child then - now I'm only a man"
> 
> Do you remember me? How we used to be?  
>  Do you think we should be closer?

It doesn’t last. The RV starts to burn out, the dealers start to become… insistent… and she moves on. Barely anyone stops at the corner of the old diner any more; barely anyone walks through Arcadia Bay. The money’s calcified around the richest family in town, and the town’s mummified alive, all life ripped out and stowed away in jars, and most people move on.

Not her. This town will never let her go. She will never let this town go.

There’s a sad woman with tired eyes and a soft smile and a cross round her neck who stops by, sometimes. She came back to save this town, in a quiet sort of way, and she’s starting with someone she used to know. She doesn’t know what the lost girl went through for her, but she’s been through a hell of her own, and they were friends, once, and she forgives even what she doesn’t understand.

One day, she offers the girl with the guitar a choice.

> By the cold and religious we were taken in hand  
>  Shown how to feel good and told to feel bad  
>  Tongue tied and terrified, we learnt how to pray  
>  Now our feelings run deep and cold as the clay  
>  And strung out behind us the banners and flags  
>  Of our possible pasts lie in tatters and rags
> 
> Do you remember me? How we used to be?  
>  Do you think we should be closer?

In one world, the girl with the guitar says _yes_. She doesn’t have faith, but she fakes it for her friend’s sake. She doesn’t have love, not the wild powerful way she wants it, but sometimes, when her tears are drying in soft greying hair and her sobs slaking in soft forgiving arms, she has something that’s enough like it to get by. She shuffles through half a life, singing her sad songs; she sleeps indoors, with her broken camera and her diary and her worn schoolbag in her arms, and she tries not to remember, and she does her best to be happy with what and who she has.

In one world, the girl with the guitar says _no_. She grows old on the streets, and her mind wanders, and when it wanders she wanders - she never lost track of time, nor what she could do with it, but once she gave in to temptation and she took the long way home, and one day a mousy girl with a Polaroid camera came up to an old woman with matted hair and no name to speak of, and she tried to care, and that was more or less the end for both of them. She disappears on the day of the storm, and she takes her past with her, and she hopes she’ll choose better this time.

Her choices have consequences.

**Author's Note:**

> Blame Eurogamer for this one. Their LP brought up the fan theory about the nameless homeless lady by the Two Whales being future!Max, and then I stumbled on this sweet sad acoustic cover of a song I already mentally tie in with LIS, and then... this. I'm sorry too.


End file.
